


when the light came through

by Solanaceae



Series: Colors [3]
Category: Love Live! School Idol Project
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, it will all connect eventually i swear, stands on its own but is in same world as the rest of the series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-07
Updated: 2018-08-07
Packaged: 2019-06-23 04:51:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15598677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solanaceae/pseuds/Solanaceae
Summary: Umi, a scavenger who picks through the old city, and Kotori, who is on a mission she does not fully understand. (Or - plot appears, suddenly.)





	when the light came through

**Author's Note:**

> WELL IT SURE HAS BEEN ALMOST A YEAR SINCE THIS SERIES UPDATED. this fic takes place an indeterminate but not super long amount of time after _lilac sky._ still can be read without reading either of the fics that come before it.

Four years, ten months, and twenty-six days after the day her world ended, Kotori came to what had once been the capital of the old nation.

Before, it had been a city spanning horizon to horizon, inhabited by millions. Even before that, it had been the seat of the emperor, had been conquered and reconquered, firebombed and rebuilt. Now, though--

Now, Kotori picked her way between fallen bricks and shattered glass as she made her way down what had been a major thoroughfare. Amid the destruction were faint signs of life: windows lacking glass, but boarded up with wood, or occasional shadows of people that darted back behind corners whenever Kotori tried to look closer.

It was dangerous to be so far out of the city center, she knew, especially with night approaching. Whoever else was out here was unlikely to take mercy on a solitary girl, especially one carrying a bulky pack on her back that could contain valuables.

Speaking of...

Kotori paused, hand going behind her back to feel at the bundle of cloth. When her fingers felt the outline of several hard and familiar things, she let out a breath. It was still there.

She paused at a street corner, examining the rusting street signs. The light of the setting sun reflected off the metal, tinting it a smoky orange. It looked like she was still a good distance from her destination; maybe it was time for her to find somewhere (relatively) safe to spend the night.

The sound of footsteps behind her made her turn. A man had emerged from a nearby alleyway - nearly a full head taller than her, with broad shoulders and a nasty gleam in his dark eyes. The hilt of a knife stuck out of a crude leather sheath attached to his belt, and his hands were huge.

Kotori took an instinctive step back and felt the cold metal of the signpost against her back.

“Whatcha up to, sweetheart?” the man asked, an undercurrent of menace threading through his words.

“N-nothing,” Kotori managed.

“Pretty girls like you shouldn’t be out so late.” The man leered at her. Kotori shrank back.

“I - I was just--”

“How ‘bout this,” the man interrupted. “You give me whatever’s in that bag you’ve got, and I let you keep walking to wherever you’re going.” He smiled, baring too many teeth for it to be comforting. “That sound good to you?”

Kotori’s hand tightened around the strap of the bag. The man took a step closer, the bulk of his body looming over her, and Kotori swallowed through a suddenly dry mouth.

“Excuse me.”

Both Kotori and the man turned at the icy voice. There was a girl standing a few yards away. She had long, black hair that seemed to glisten almost blue in the fading light, and a short wooden staff in her hand that she leveled menacingly at the man.

And when her eyes met Kotori’s, they bloomed into color.

Kotori’s breath caught in her throat. She looked around. The bricks, previously tinted grey, had a slow flush of brown creeping across them. The man’s hair faded from grey to a light, ragged brown. Even the dirt under her feet was suddenly stained a deep brown, rich and vibrant and enough to make tears prick at Kotori’s eyes. It was just dirt, something she walked on every day of her life, but suddenly a missing color had slotted into place beside the rest. _Her_ missing color.

Oblivious to the revelation unfolding before Kotori’s eyes, the man turned from her to snarl at the newcomer. “Whatcha want, bitch?”

The girl - Kotori’s _soulmate_ , she realized with a jolt - took a step forward. “I’d like you to step away from her.”

“Or what?” the man scoffed. “You’ll hit me with that little stick of yours?”

The girl moved in a blur of movement, closing the distance between her and the man faster than Kotori would have thought possible, staff arcing downwards. With a resounding crack, the wood impacted the man’s shoulder. He staggered back with a grunt of pain, eyes widening.

“Leave,” the girl said, in the same even tone of voice. The man gaped at her for a moment longer, then turned and broke into a run.

Once he had disappeared, the girl turned to Kotori, offering her a small smile. Her brown eyes - _brown_ \- were surprisingly warm.

“Th-thank you,” Kotori managed to get out. (She had never imagined that a color could be so beautiful.) “I’m Kotori.”

“Umi.” The girl leaned her staff on her shoulder. “Nice to meet you,” she added, as though she had not just successfully beaten a fully grown man off of Kotori.

“Did you see that?” Kotori’s heart was pounding loud enough that she was sure Umi could hear it. _Did you see your color?_

Umi’s brow creased with genuine confusion. “See what?”

The joy that had flared to life in Kotori’s chest sputtered out like a dampened match.

“Never mind,” she mumbled.

Umi frowned, but seemed to brush it off. “Anyway. You shouldn’t be out here so late if you can’t defend yourself.”

This happened sometimes. Soulmates did not always match up. She _knew_ that, but had somehow never considered it as a possibility for herself.

“I was just passing through,” she mumbled through the taste of disappointment. “I didn’t mean to be here so late.”

Umi made a noise in the back of her throat. Skepticism, perhaps, or criticism. “Do you have somewhere to stay for the night?”

“I don’t.” Kotori crossed her arms and shivered, suddenly cold.

“You can stay with me, if you like.”

Despite herself, hope stuttered in her throat for a moment. “Really?”

Umi nodded.

***

Umi’s home turned out to be the entire third floor of an abandoned apartment building. The railing on the stairs that led up to it was broken in multiple places; the elevator doors at each landing opened out into an empty shaft. Kotori followed Umi through the wreckage to a thick door with a padlock through the handle that Umi unlocked with a small key that hung from a chain around her neck.

Inside, the walls were hung with cloth - a mismatched, overlapping collection of old carpets, tapestries, and blankets in a wild array of colors. Woven throughout were shades of brown, some rich, some dull, but all of them shining clearly amid the rest of the colors illuminated by the beam of Umi’s flashlight. Kotori’s eyes widened.

“This building doesn’t have electricity,” Umi explained, tucking the key back into her shirt. “The hangings are to keep the cold out.”

“Where did you get all of these?” Kotori asked.

Umi shrugged. “Around. Most of the buildings on this block are empty.”

“You’re a scavenger?”

“I suppose so. I only take from places that are completely abandoned, though - I would never steal from someone alive,” Umi hastened to add, seeming worried that Kotori would misinterpret her actions as criminal. (As if laws existed in this world anymore.)

“Of course not,” she agreed. Umi seemed to relax.

“Do you want some water?”

“Sure.”

Umi led her into a wide, open room with neatly folded blankets piled on the floor. Kotori sank down onto one of the piles, crossing her legs. The light from the flashlight bounced away as Umi left, then returned with two cups of water.

“So where do you come from?” Umi asked, sitting across from her. She propped the flashlight against a pillow, casting a beam of light between them.

Kotori sipped the water. It had a stale but clean taste. “Gunma Prefecture,” she said.

“Do you travel a lot?”

“I’ve spent most of my life traveling.”

“What do you have in the bag?”

Wordlessly, Kotori unwrapped the cloth covering the opening of the sack and upended it. Rods of metal spilled out, each about the thickness of three of her fingers held together. Umi inhaled sharply.

“Are those--” She reached for one, then drew back her fingers as though burned. “Are those nuclear power rods?”

Kotori nodded. Each rod was nearly identical, save for the numbers stamped on one end - the serial numbers of the plants they had powered. One of these rods was enough to sustain an entire district, when hooked up to the right machinery.

“Where did you get all of these?” Umi asked.

“My parents used to travel across the country, after everything that happened, to salvage power rods from the failing nuclear plants. I continued doing it after they died.” She paused, swallowing back the ache that came whenever she thought of her parents, then added, “Maybe you can help me.”

“How?”

“I need to know where this district’s plant is.”

“It’s about half a mile west of--” Umi frowned. “Wait. Are you going to break into it?”

“Yes?”

Umi looked displeased. “I don’t know if I can help, then.”

Kotori opened her mouth to protest, then thought better of it. She had known Umi for about an hour, but already she got the impression that it was not wise to cross her. Maybe she could convince her later.

Umi stood, stretching. “I’m tired. I’ll show you where you can sleep.”

***

Umi led her to a mattress on the ground, and Kotori lay down on it, suddenly aware of how tired she was. The flashlight clicked off, Umi folded herself into her own bed, and Kotori was left in the dark.

When she closed her eyes, the same dream started, on a constant loop. White-uniformed people outside the window, hammering on the door. Her mother, shoving the bag of power rods at her, telling her to hide. Finding a utility closet and pulling the radiation suits around herself. The sounds of screams, then silence.

It was the silence that terrified Kotori. It crept between the suits, in this dream, burrowed into her throat until she felt like she might burst. She knew that if she opened her mouth, no sound would emerge, so she stayed still, pressed deep amid the stiff fabric, trying to make herself as small as possible as she waited for the dream to end. Worse than the silence was when someone started calling her name, over and over, increasingly desperate. She plugged her ears with her fingers, squeezing her eyes shut.

She shivered awake into darkness. For a moment, she lay still, disoriented - then the sound of Umi’s soft snores drifted over from across the room.

Four years, almost five, and she still had the same dream every night. The memory was inescapable: emerging from the closet hours later, entire body trembling with fear, to find blood smeared and tracked across the floor. Her parents were gone; all she had left of them was the bag of metal rods that clinked as she opened it.

Now, in the dark of Umi’s apartment, she reached for the bag to feel its comforting weight. She knew the serial numbers almost by heart, each corresponding to a plant she had visited. She had a mental map, too, of all the plants she still had to make her way to.

She only had a vague idea of what her parents had planned to do with the rods, but collecting all the ones in this country was likely to take her entire life anyway. It was her way of carrying on her parents’ memory, she told herself. (It was her way of occupying herself so she had no time to face what she had lost.)

She rolled over and closed her eyes again.

***

Somehow, one night at Umi’s turned to days, then nearly two weeks. Kotori wasn’t exactly inclined to leave this city now that she knew her soulmate was in it, and Umi seemed to welcome the company.

At first, she stayed in while Umi went scavenging, but soon her restlessness got the better of her, and she asked the dark-haired girl if she could accompany her. Umi agreed. Kotori had still not brought up the subject of the nuclear plant again; perhaps this would give her an opening to do so.

Umi showed her the rough map she had sketched of this district, thicker lines delineating where she had already scavenged. They made their way towards the far end of the map, weaving between the rusting cars that choked the streets.

On the way, Umi explained the rough geography of the district to her - the vast swathes of scavenger territory (called the “badlands”) that surrounded a thin ring of repaired buildings and transient groups of people that subsisted on solar power (the “lower city”). In the center of it all was the domed city, with patrols that both cleared the lower city out on a regular basis and provided a thin stream of illicit valuables and drugs to the people that scratched out a living in the ruined suburbs.

They found an abandoned apartment building and began searching it methodically, working their way up the five floors. Their conversation drifted through several different topics - Umi's favorite scavenging spots, her struggles to find water purifying tablets and batteries - and eventually, soulmates.

“When I was younger, I thought it was all a big joke.” Umi threw her weight against the crowbar she was using to pry the apartment door open, grunting slightly with exertion. The lock snapped. “Soulmates don’t _sound_ like something that should be real, you know?”

Kotori hummed agreement as she followed Umi into the apartment. Light filtered through the cracked windows, illuminating the thick layer of dust that covered everything. “But what about the colors?” Another thought rose, and she blurted it out before she could think better of it. “Have you met your soulmate already?”

“I don’t know. I’m not missing any color.” Umi opened a cupboard, ran a hand through the dust in it, closed it again. “Why, what color are you missing?”

She teetered on the edge of confessing, but a lie slipped out instead. “Brown.”

“Well, most of the world has brown eyes. You’ll find them eventually.”

Kotori nodded, didn’t tell her the truth - everything around her was the color of earth, warm and vibrant and glowing like Umi’s eyes, the richest shade of mahogany she could’ve ever dreamed.

Umi straightened from where she had been searching through the lower cabinets. “I think this place has been mostly cleared out. We should move on.”

***

One morning, she entered the room that served as Umi’s study without knocking, a question about the water purifying tablets ready. To her surprise, she found Umi hunched over the table, a pen in her hand, writing something down.

Umi looked up at the sound of the door and hurriedly shoved whatever it was behind her back. For a moment, the scavenger looked like a child caught sneaking sweets from the communal cache. Kotori raised an eyebrow.

“What were you doing?”

“N-nothing.” But there was something like panic on Umi’s face, mingled with... was that embarrassment?

“Aw, come on.” Kotori held out a hand, offering her gentlest smile. “Can I see?”

Umi shook her head, mumbled, “You’ll laugh at me.”

“I won’t.” When Umi looked at her doubtfully, Kotori repeated, “I _won’t_. I promise.”

Reluctance clear on her face, Umi brought a crumpled piece of paper out from behind her back. Kotori took it. There were words there, in the careful script of someone who had taught themselves to write. Kotori read it, read it again, then looked up at Umi.

“Is this - poetry?”

Umi nodded, face red.

“It’s beautiful.”

“Really?” Umi looked doubtful.

“It _is_.” She got a tentative smile in response to that, and something about the hopeful, pleased look on Umi’s face made her chest ache.

***

Later, lying in bed that night, she realized just how deep in she was.

Coming here, meeting Umi - all of that had been pure chance. Finding her soulmate had come down to being in the right place at the right time by sheer luck, but falling in love with her - _that_ had been inevitable.

Umi, with her warm brown eyes and fleeting smile, who was a survivor in a broken world and still found it in herself to write poetry about beauty. Umi, who had stared down a grown man twice her size and sent him running. Umi, who had taken pity on a stranger, invited her into her home, given her whatever she asked for.

What did Kotori have to offer her?

***

They sat on the third-floor balcony one evening, looking down on the empty street. A light breeze blew scraps of plastic across the cracked asphalt and made the hairs on the back of Kotori’s arms prickle. They talked as they usually did, Umi reminiscing on her scavenger childhood, Kotori sharing what she remembered of her parents.

“Do you ever think about how the world was before?” Umi asked eventually.

Kotori shook her head. “Not much. My business is mostly how it all got messed up.”

Umi shifted in her seat, looking confused. “I thought we already _knew_ it was a war that ended everything. A giant war between all the countries.”

“No. That’s what people think, but that’s only because it all happened too quickly for them to figure it all out.”

“What really happened?”

Kotori shook her head. (Memories of her mother, eyes serious, voice heavy with secrecy, _this is something that you cannot trust anyone with._ ) “I don’t know.”

“You do.” Umi leaned forward, brown eyes intense. “You know more than you want to tell.”

_I do._ Kotori squeezed her eyes shut until bright spots burst behind her vision. When she opened them, Umi was still staring at her.

If she couldn’t trust Umi, then who could she trust?

“My mother always said that relying on one thing - or person - for everything was the most dangerous thing someone could do,” Kotori said slowly. “That’s what humanity did.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was a time - through the 30’s, maybe even into the 40’s, when we got all our power from stripping the earth of what it had. Coal, natural gas, all those things.” Kotori laced her hands together in her lap, kept her eyes fixed on them. “We realized that we were killing ourselves with that, suffocating everything, so we switched to something - not cleaner, but less immediately deadly.”

Umi made a noise of realization. “Nuclear power.”

Kotori nodded. This was almost easy, slipping into her mother’s voice like this was just another history lesson. “By the turn of the century, nearly every city had its own nuclear plant. It was a compact, non-polluting method of producing power, and our disposal techniques had advanced so much that hardly _anyone_ had a convincing reason to resist the change.”

“But nuclear bombs—”

“Were a thing of the past. The big ones were all back in the 1900’s. Even by the early 2020’s, the major world powers had downgraded their supplies to the point where mutually assured destruction was no longer a threat. Oh, there were countries who built missiles and made loud noises about shooting them off, but even with that, people only came close to real nuclear war a few times. Even that would not have been enough to destroy more than a small percent of the world.”

And it wasn’t as if the whole world was like this now, anyway, cities flattened and irradiated - the major industrialized powers had been leveled, but isolationist nations and those too backwards to accept nuclear power had probably survived fine. According to her parents, at least.

She looked up at Umi. Umi’s eyes were wide, curious. “But there are bomb craters in the city center. I’ve _seen_ them.”

Kotori nodded. “Right. Once everything started falling apart, missiles came out of reserves, and everyone was shooting everyone else, blaming each other. But the real downfall of humanity - that was the plants. Everything was _connected_ , see? There were central computers controlling multiple plants, and even bigger computers controlling those. Who knows how long it took them, but they managed to hack into almost all of them and set off a chain of events that led to about 90% of all the nuclear plants in the _world_ going into catastrophic meltdown.”

“Who were they?”

Kotori shrugged. “No one knows.” It wasn’t quite true. Her parents had known, or at least suspected; they had never told Kotori, but she had overhead enough whispered conversations in the control room when they thought she was asleep. “People that wanted to see the world burn.”

Umi looked thoughtful. “To imagine that such a big disaster could have been caused just by power plants, though.”

“Have you heard of Chernobyl? Fukushima Daiichi?”

Umi shook her head.

“Both happened in the early days of nuclear power. Big disasters that left areas of contamination where people could no longer live. Nuclear plants were _always_ more dangerous than the bombs were, we just never saw it.”

“Why doesn’t anyone know about this?”

Kotori considered this. The downfall had been within her parents’ memory, but it was true - hardly anyone knew anything about how it had all happened.

“My parents thought there was something suspicious about all of it,” she said carefully. “Someone is hiding something. They were trying to figure it all out, and they got killed because they were getting too close to the answer.” That was her guess, anyways. “I’m trying to continue their mission.”

“You think someone did this on purpose?” Umi sounded eager and concerned at the same time. Kotori glanced at her - she was leaning forward in her seat.

“It’s hard to think of another explanation. The only problem is - who benefits? Who would _want_ to make the world end?” She had thought about these questions for most of her life, and still had only vague hints of an answer. “That’s why I’m still collecting these rods.” The bag was at her side, as it always was. She nudged it with her foot, making the rods clank. “If my parents thought they were important enough to keep going after, then maybe they’ll lead to an answer.”

Umi considered this for a long moment, then nodded, seeming to come to a decision. “I’ll show you the way to the plant.”

Kotori sat up straight. “You will?”

“Yes.” Umi looked suddenly determined, face painted red by the dying sun, which had almost slipped entirely below the horizon. “If someone did this on purpose - if someone ruined the whole world - then I want to know who. I want to help you figure it out.”

Kotori felt a smile break across her face. “Thank you, Umi.”

***

“This district’s power plant is deep in upper city territory. I tend to stay on the fringes, even if the pickings are slimmer, because the patrols sweep those areas pretty thoroughly. We have to be careful.” Umi’s eyes were serious, her hands spread flat on the table. Between them was the rough map Umi had sketched of the district. The domed city was a blot of emptiness in the center.

“Do you know the patrol times?”

“They tend to be pretty regular, yes. That will help.” Umi folded the map and tucked it into her pocket, then picked up her staff. The gloss of the polished wood caught the light, the same shade of luminous brown as her eyes. Kotori felt a hollow sort of hurt in her chest.

She busied herself with adjusting the already perfect straps of her bag.

“Okay.” Umi’s jaw was set. “Are you ready?”

Kotori nodded.

***

They picked their way across the rubble-strewn but open land between the edge of the old city and where the white walls of the domed city rose against the clouded sky. Even though they had timed their excursion between patrols, Kotori couldn’t help but feel like someone was watching her. It felt too empty out here, too exposed. Still, they reached the power plant without incident.

There was a lock, of course, but Umi made short work of that: it turned out she was just as skilled with lockpicks as she was with a crowbar. Her brow was furrowed with suppressed concern the entire time, and Kotori had to resist the urge to tell her that this wasn’t breaking any laws - no laws that mattered, anyway.

Inside, the air was still and carried the faint smell of ancient machine oil. Kotori took the lead, Umi’s flashlight in one hand. The arc of light illuminated the paint peeling off the walls, the long-dead lightbulbs.

Passing through a residential quarter, the floors and walls changed - instead of impersonal cinderblock and concrete, there were wooden boards and panels. Here, tall windows coated in decades worth of dust made the flashlight unnecessary.

“This must’ve been a big plant,” Kotori told Umi, tucking the flashlight into her bag. “Big enough to have a permanent task force, anyway.”

“I didn’t realize people lived in these, too,” Umi said. She took another step forward, and the floor creaked alarmingly.

Kotori opened her mouth to tell her to move, but there was a loud crack, and the floorboards beneath Umi gave out, pitching the dark-haired girl forward and down, arms flailing. Kotori gasped.

“Umi!”

She rushed to the edge. Umi clung to what remained of the beam, hanging half a meter below the floor Kotori stood on. There was a soft clatter as Umi’s staff struck the floor somewhere far below. Umi’s knuckles were white with the strain of holding onto the wood.

“Help me up,” she gritted out.

Kotori got down on her stomach and stretched an arm out, straining to reach Umi. Her fingertips brushed the back of Umi’s hand.

“Can you reach me?” she asked. “I’m not sure I can even hold you--”

Umi took one hand off the beam and grabbed Kotori’s hand. Kotori grunted at the sudden weight. “I’m going to let go of this,” Umi said, voice somehow still even despite the fear in her eyes. “You need to pull me up. Are you ready?”

Kotori nodded, bracing herself.

Even though she knew it was coming, the shift of Umi’s bodyweight into her grasp nearly made her slip over the side herself. She managed to catch herself; then summoning all her strength, she clenched her jaw and pulled. Umi’s feet kicked at empty air, her free hand scrabbling at the edge for purchase for a panicked moment, and then she seized it. Kotori helped her haul herself up, first slinging a leg up, then pushing up to her feet.

They stood there, breathing heavily, and Kotori had to resist the urge to reach up and brush away the dark hair that had come untucked from behind Umi’s ears.

“You can let go of my hand now, you know,” Umi said with a small smile.

“What?” Kotori looked down and saw that her hand was still holding Umi’s tight enough to dimple the skin. “Oh!” She released Umi’s hand, managing a chuckle. “Sorry about that.”

“No, it’s - thank you for saving me.” Umi looked regretfully down at the hole in the floor. “Pity I lost my staff, it was a good one. But we should keep moving.”

“Right.” She swallowed, adjusting her pack, then headed down the hallway again, her hand still warm where it had clutched Umi’s.

***

She found the control room after a few wrong turns - someone had modified the layout of this place, whether during construction or after the end of the world, but her instinct and knowledge of plant layouts led her true in the end. Her instinct had also conditioned her to expect lightless halls and dead reactors, so it was a surprise when they reached the control room to find the switchboard lit up, soft pulsing green and yellow lights like constellations.

“This place is still functional,” Kotori breathed, turning around to take in the whole control room. The windows looking down on the core itself were dust-free. She could feel the reactor’s hum, bone-deep and thrumming.

“It’s the upper city patrols,” Umi said. “It has to be. They don’t let anyone else close enough to run an entire plant.”

“But why would they bother? I don’t--” Realization dawned on her. “This is where they get their power.”

Umi frowned. “You think so?”

“Think about it.” Kotori leaned forward, running her hand lightly over the switches on the control board. “How else do they keep an entire city running, all their air purified and their lights on? It’s connected to this plant.”

“But something like that - that’s hard to set up, it would’ve taken them years.”

“That’s it,” Kotori breathed.

“What?”

“That’s _it_ ,” Kotori repeated, turning to Umi. “It took them years. They _knew_ the end was coming. They built their cities and they waited and they survived.”

Realization sparked in Umi’s eyes. “The only way they could’ve known--”

“--is if they were complicit,” Kotori finished.

***

The reactor room’s temperature controls were still intact as well: Kotori’s breath fogged in front of her as they entered, the room a good ten degrees cooler than the previous one. She approached the reactor, Umi hanging a few steps back. There, nestled amid the wires and slotted into a socket, was what she had come for.

Despite years of searching for the rods, she had never seen a reactor active before. This one was operating at a low power level, but still felt _alive_ in a way the broken wires and unlit circuits of the others had been.

Kotori inhaled, then reached for the power rod. Her fingers settled against cool metal, snapping wires away.

The moment she freed it from its base, a screech split the air. She yelped, nearly dropping the rod, then turned towards Umi. The dark-haired girl was suddenly lit up red from the lights flashing over the doors - the doors that were _closing._

She shoved the power rod into her bag and sprinted for the nearest exit, grabbing Umi’s wrist as she ran. The doors slid together rapidly, the gap between them growing smaller and smaller as her feet pounded on the concrete floor, the cool air stinging her throat.

The alarm cut out as the doors slammed shut inches from her reaching hand. She skidded to a halt, and Umi nearly crashed into her.

A few choice words she had learned during her years on the road bubbled up in her throat, and she just barely managed to force them back down. Instead, she kicked the door hard enough to make her toe hurt.

“That won’t do anything,” Umi said, pushing past her to feel at the seam between the doors. There were no visible controls on this side of the door, Kotori realized belatedly - bad safety protocol, but very good for trapping intruders inside. Almost as if they had been expecting this.

“We’re trapped,” she said, voice breathier than she wanted it to be. “Umi, they’re going to come, they’re going to find us--”

“We’ll find a way out,” Umi said, but there was alarm in her eyes. She felt at the door’s edge as if searching for hinges, then turned away. “Is there something from the reactor we can use to pry--”

The sound of a door slamming, and heavy footsteps - several sets. A few seconds later, fists thudding against the door. Kotori’s heart stuttered.

(White uniforms and her parents’ screams and blood on the floor--)

She did not realize she was hyperventilating until she felt Umi’s hands on her shoulders, heard the dark-haired girl saying, “Deep breaths. Slow.”

_I can’t,_ she tried to say, but her throat closed off. Her head was spinning, the pounding on the door indistinguishable from the pounding of blood in her ears.

“I’m here, you’re okay,” Umi was saying, and Kotori looked up into her eyes, brown like soil, like memory, and her chest felt suddenly feather-full and shattered. So she did the only thing she could think of, the only thing she _wanted_ to do, and leaned in to kiss Umi.

Umi’s lips were parted, shaping words that Kotori could barely hear, and so the kiss was half clashing teeth, half a startled inhale of breath, and entirely heat. She was tempted to linger, wait to see if Umi kissed her back, but her heart was starting to slow into something resembling calmness, so she pulled away and watched the emotion flicker across Umi’s face - surprise, consternation, realization.

“Kotori--”

“Don’t,” Kotori whispered. “I only - I had to do that, just once.” She turned away, half-hoping she could cry alone for a bit before the upper city patrol burst in, but Umi seized her wrist.

“Kotori,” she said, more insistently, “I have an idea.”

***

The patrol leader had expected the alarm to be a false one, some error in the system or dust mote caught in the circuits, so she was surprised when her officers finally coaxed the doors into opening ( _damn_ these old systems, never could rely on them) and they slid open to reveal two figures standing hand-in-hand beside the reactor.

She caught only a glimpse of their faces - scared, determined, little more than girls - before the flash of light and cloud of smoke that swept out from the reactor. She threw her hands up instinctively to shield her eyes, years of nuclear horror stories flashing through her mind in the instant it took for the smoke to reach her.

For a moment, she thought her mind was fooling her in her last moment, and then she realized: the smoke wasn’t hot. Warm, sure, but nowhere near the upper limits of the radiation suits and not even close to being enough to melt flesh off bones. She waved her hand in front of her face, trying to clear the blinding haze, and felt rather than saw the two girls rush past her. She grabbed at them, just barely missing, then stumbled over one of her own officers, who had thrown himself to the floor.

Cursing, she forced herself to stand still rather than move blindly and risk injury. The infiltrators had gotten away, there was nothing to be done about that, but she had to make sure the reactor was not compromised.

When the smoke cleared, she strode past her cowering officers over to the machinery, which was still hissing and spitting sparks. Any meltdown should by all rights have been fatal, but as she drew closer, her suspicions were confirmed - the power rod was gone, its cradle empty.

“Fuck,” she hissed under her breath, then louder: “Call command central. We have a problem.”

***

Kotori and Umi ran down the hill, feet skidding in the loose gravel. The power rods in Kotori’s pack bounced as she moved, the solid clinking of metal a familiar and comforting sound. She felt a laugh rise in her chest and let it loose, the wind tearing it away. Beside her, Umi was grinning, relief clear on her face.

Eventually, they reached the lower city and ducked inside an abandoned building, panting. Kotori put her hands on her knees, struggling for breath, then sank down to sit with her back against the wall, reaching for the water bottle in her pack.

Umi sat beside her. “We made it out,” she said.

Kotori smiled broadly. “We did. Thank you.”

“Thank _you_. I wouldn’t have known how to rig the reactor like that.” Umi accepted the water bottle from Kotori, drank. For a few minutes, they sat there, catching their breath. Kotori’s face still felt flushed from the running and the exhilaration of their escape.

“So.” Umi cleared her throat, and to Kotori’s surprise, she saw a hint of red suffusing the scavenger’s cheeks. “About what happened.”

She could have been talking about her brush with death, or their near-capture. Kotori knew she wasn’t. “You’re my soulmate,” she said, and it was strange how _simple_ it was to say that, after all this time. Her mind felt clearer than it had in a long time. “I’m not yours.”

“I always thought - wondered - if there was something wrong with me.”

“Because you weren’t missing your color.”

Umi nodded. “But I think it doesn’t matter, does it?”

Kotori blinked, startled. “What do you mean?”

“I mean - this is--” Umi stuttered off, looking more flustered than Kotori had ever seen her, even more than when Kotori had caught her writing poetry. “You and me. We aren’t. I mean - we got to know each other without me knowing we were soulmates, and you never acted like I owed you anything because of the colors, and it all just happened _naturally_.” The last bit came out all in a rush. “That doesn’t make any sense, does it.”

“It makes sense!” Kotori protested. “But I don’t _mind_ if you don’t care for me like that, really.” It was true - she still felt that warmth when she looked at Umi, and it would hurt to leave her, but there was no use fighting the inevitable.

“Kotori.” Umi looked suddenly serious. “I’m saying that I _do_ care for you like that.”

Kotori opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She tried again, managed to squeak out, “you do?”

Instead of answering, Umi moved forward and kissed her, breeze-gentle and startlingly warm. “Yes,” she said, pulling back and leaning her head against Kotori’s shoulder, “yes, I do.”

Kotori hesitated, then wrapped her arm around Umi.

Umi curled against her, pressing their sides together. “One question, though,” she said after a pause. “Why kiss me _then_?”

Kotori considered this, wrapping a strand of Umi’s hair around her finger to see the contrast of dark against her skin. “I was scared,” she said at last. “And you were trying to help me calm down instead of finding a way to run away.” She paused, then added, “Also, I thought we were going to die.”

Umi stifled a laugh in her hand. “How romantic.”

Kotori leaned down and pressed a kiss to Umi’s forehead. “Is that better?”

Umi smiled, then sobered. “What do we do now? They’ll be looking for us, I’m sure.”

“We have what we came for,” Kotori said, nudging the pack with her foot. “And we’ll figure out what happens next.”

“Together,” Umi added firmly, and Kotori smiled.

“Together,” she agreed.

**Author's Note:**

> next fic will likely pick up nozomi's storyline again, and then things will start coming together. can't promise it won't be another year, though.
> 
> please do let me know what you thought in a comment!


End file.
